The Mower, Against Gardens Themes

Taken by itself, the poem remains fairly unambiguous in its meaning. Humankind, in its economic and cultural development, has generated more wealth than it knows what to do with. In a false sophistication, man has replaced nature with an art that is merely tasteless display. While this is serious enough, what he has really done is to corrupt nature itself. The purity of natural innocence is replaced by a seduced nature, which is then reduced further in its moral and spiritual power by becoming merely a taste, a vogue. Moral and spiritual categories are lost, as is, ultimately, man’s identity as a created being. Man’s hubris is to take over God’s creation, rather than steward it, for his own exploitative pleasures. Such a reading would accord with the Puritan ethos of the seventeenth century as expressed, for example, in Milton’s Comus (1637); it would also accord with the ecological morality of the late twentieth century.

Such a straightforward reading can be questioned, however, in two ways—first, by linking this poem with the other mower poems, second, by linking it to “The Garden,” one of Marvell’s best-known poems. If the figure of the mower in all the poems is considered, then he is not, perhaps, the upright Puritan he appears to be here. Ultimately, he is overtaken by passion; he falls himself. Nature’s innocence, then, seems either illusory or too fragile for man to hold. Perhaps the mower himself is overly proud or is...

(The entire section is 457 words.)

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